The present invention relates to the field of packaging, and more particularly to forming a group of two or more individual packages fastened together.
It is known to form groups of two or more packages for convenient marketing purposes. Conventional cartons of cigarette packages typically including ten individual packages are but one example.
Various other examples are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 2,888,132 issued on May 26, 1959 to Guyer; U.S. Pat. No. 2,920,759 issued on Jan. 12, 1960 to Carnes; and U.S. Pat. No. 3,148,768 issued on Sept. 15, 1964 to Gatto. Further, U.S. Pat. No. 4,068,028 issued on Jan. 10, 1978 to Samonides; and U.S. Pat. No. 4,479,316 issued on Oct. 30, 1984 to Wippern each disclosed adhesive-backed labels for attachment to, for example, packages.
It has become a popular marketing technique to offer, for example, "two for the price of one" product sales. It is also typical to attach the two packages containing the product on sale together for convenience.
The advent of pricing bar codes on product packages for automatic recording of sales has, however, presented a problem to the attaching of product packages together into groups for these type of sales. The problem basically is that the automatic bar code reading equipment will read and register the pricing bar codes on each of the packages of the group on sale. This will result in either a confusing signal registered by the code reading equipment as it attempts to concurrently read and register two bar codes, or will cause the code reading equipment to register the price for both packages of the group ignoring the fact that the price of one of the two packages should not be registered.